Return from beyond

I’ve been back from the launch hoopla in China for a week now. Seems like forever. The silence* on the blog has you all wondering if I’ve retired, no doubt.

Not exactly. Beyond Space and Time continues to stretch us to the limits with its popularity as we close in on 175,000 activated users. At all hours of every day you’ll find hundreds of people ambling about, mostly chatting and taking tours in Chinese. It’s so much more gratifying even than the unbelievable coverage the project has generated.

Some have understandably been confused about whether the Virtual Forbidden City is part of Second Life. (Many people consider virtual worlds and Second Life the same thing.) The short answer is no. The VFC is a separate download. For those of you who are curious — just not maybe 200 MB curious, yet — you can get a taste of the project in Second Life at our little marketing outpost for the project. The island is called BeyondSpaceAndTime and, if you have Second Life installed, you can go directly.

* If you like your ramblings more frequent consider following my Twitter stream.

Mr. Romer’s answer is to do with this moment what Burning Man does every summer: Stake out the street grid; separate public from private space; and leave room for what’s to come. Then let the free market take over."

Cross-posted at Medium. Years ago, when I was just moving into the world of urban technology, I stumbled upon the urban “walkshop” format developed by Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim (refined and expanded by Mayo Nissen). These walking tours were collaborative, lightly-structured investigations of surveillance and communications machinery sprinkled throughout various cities. Though these walkshops […]

Cross-posted at Medium. CityFi partners John Tolva and Story Bellows frequently find themselves on the frontier of urban change. Their facilitation of major projects often convenes public-private stakeholders, utilizes new models of technology and innovation, and drives policy development, all with the goal of making our cities more livable, vibrant and economically competitive. Currently, this […]